Increased awareness and concerns about fire prevention in homes, businesses, and industrial settings have spurred the enactment of standards and legislation in both the United States and abroad directed to reducing the risk of fires. From a regulatory standpoint, these concerns have encompassed bedding and upholstered articles in particular.
For many years mattress flammability in the United States has been regulated under a cigarette ignition standard in the Code of Federal Regulations under 16 C.F.R. §1632. More recent standards further require assessment of the product's flammability when exposed to an open flame ignition source. For instance, the state of California enacted an open flame standard for mattresses, effective since January 2005, as California Technical Bulletin 603. The testing specified by California Technical Bulletin 603 of the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs (“TB-603”) exposes the top and side of a mattress to an open gas flame, and, following the exposure, the mattress and foundation are monitored for thirty minutes to measure heat generation rate and total heat generation. In July 2007 the United States Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) enacted a regulation under 16 C.F.R. §1633 for an open flame nationwide standard for mattresses, which is patterned after Technical Bulletin 603 in many respects. Open flame flammability testing of bedclothing, such as filling materials used in bedclothing items such as comforters and bedspreads, also is the subject of proposed regulations in the United States at the Federal level (e.g., proposed 16 C.F.R. §1634) and state level (e.g., draft California Technical Bulletin 604).
Prior to the present invention, numerous flame resistant fabric designs have involved inclusion of conventionally-recognized flame retardant or self-extinguishing fibers to impart flame retardancy, such as glass fibers, oxidized polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fibers, modacrylic fibers, and so forth. Conventional flame retardant and self-extinguishing fibers can entail costlier chemistries, require special processing, detract from fabric hand (feel), resiliency, or other fabric properties, or have other drawbacks. For instance, numerous conventional flame retardant fibers require various comonomer chemistries, halogen chemistries, and/or carbonization treatments, and so forth. In alternative designs, flame retardant topical coatings have been used on some nonwoven fabrics in manners believed to provide optimal flame retardance.